Although Howlett’s performances were also predicated on ‘service’, he was actually paid for his labour (probably strictly by the hour). Accordingly, it seemed that he was not so much attempting to transcend the capitalist dasein as draw attention to the way labour attracts a financial equivalent, an ‘abstract’ fiduciary value. It is this symbolic, abstract value of art labour that lay at the heart of the artist’s conceptualist proposition; to wit, that labour’s value changes when it assumes an aesthetic dimension when performed in the art world. And further, that this arbitrary value is susceptible to the influences and pressures that operate in broader consumer culture. This may explain why he approached his teachers to help him fulfil his tasks, for as authority figures in a renowned art school they had a certain ‘currency’ that added value to Howlett’s art performances or outputs. There was also an interesting reversal to this relationship for the teachers paid for the student’s labour rather than being paid for their pedagogical services. The work may have also owed something to Michael Asher’s brilliant conception of his own creativity as measured by the fees he charges according to concept, time and place. Asher sets a limit on the length of time his ‘services’ can be used, and so controls the value of his art labour while limiting the capacity of others to profit from his work; i.e. collector re-sells at teratical profit, the artist gets zilch.

This examination of artistic labour demonstrated Howlett’s early interest in the rationale of consumer capitalist society, and how artists negotiate this condition. Today’s post-avant-garde can be characterised as having adopted a pragmatic attitude in this milieu – one that both accepts the decline of art’s authority as well as its incorporation into a consumer society that especially values forms of ‘creative labour’ predicated on celebrity, entertainment and publicity. That being the case, the artist must adapt the notion of artistic value to a system that is heavily invested in mediating perceptions, and often encourages hysteria and other intense emotions so as to attract enough transient interest to secure a sale.